[Texmacs-dev] Re: Compiling TexMacs on OSX

[Abdelrazak Younes]

address@hidden wrote:
> > Ok ... how can I help to improve the mac port?
>
> the port is in a very early stage. My first goal has been to implement 
> roughly the basic stuff, also to get acquainted with the source code. 
> Joris has made a very nice work in separating the different layers of 
> the GUI and it has been not so difficult to make TeXmacs run natively 
> under cocoa. 

Hello,

Sorry in advance for my interruption in this list. I am a core developer 
of LyX and I would like to share my experience with you. Please, take it 
this way or simply ignore me if this advice sounds inappropriate.

FYI, LyX has made the same mistake you are doing now with the so called 
"GUI independence project". At one point of time we had four frontends 
(xforms, Qt3, Qt4 and Gtk), I can assure that this was sucking an awful 
lot of energy and that was the main reason why the LyX GUI stagnated for 
*years* because every little change to the interface needed to be 
propagated to the four frontends. Now that we decided to concentrate on 
one frontend and that we eliminated the indirection introduced by the 
GUII project, things are moving faster than ever at user interface level.

So, IMNSHO, you should concentrate on one cross-platform graphical 
toolkit. Don't get me wrong, it's a very good idea to separate the core 
code from the GUI code but wasting energy on multiple frontends is not. 
Of course, everybody is free to do what he/she wants but, if you want 
Texmacs to evolve, that's not the right way IMO. There are a number of 
cross-platform toolkits available, you should just pick one (Qt, Gtk, 
Java, etc). I can assure you that the user won't see the difference 
between a Cocoa app and a Qt/Mac app, really.

Side note: I don't see Texmacs as a competitor for LyX, they just fill 
different niches. And I am not interested in competition anyway :-) 
Actually I think there is a lot of room for collaboration between the 
two projects.

Sorry again if my post seems arrogant, that was not the intention, I 
just couldn't resist to share my LyX experience with you :-)

Regards,
Abdel.

PS: I am not sure if I need to subscribe in order to post so I put some 
people in copy, hope you don't mind.